Sunday 9 January 2000 12.37 EST
First published on Sunday 9 January 2000 12.37 EST

White TeethZadie SmithHamish Hamilton, £12.99, pp462

It is more than 300 years since Daniel Defoe, in his poem 'The True-born Englishman' first recognised the essentially heterogeneous condition of the nation. He described the English as a people composed of mongrelised 'mixtures', identifying the Scot, Pict and Dane among many other constituent elements. Should Defoe have been able to glance at modern, postcolonial Britain, he would have to add the West Indian, the Indian and the African. It is precisely this helpless heterogeneity that Zadie Smith recognises and celebrates in this restless and wonderfully poised first novel, White Teeth.

The novel follows the fortunes of the families of two best friends: Archie Jones, a white, working-class man who works in a mail-order delivery firm, and who is married for a second time to a Jamaican woman, Clara, and Samad Iqbal, a Bangladeshi who is married to Alansa, and who works in a restaurant. As the hinge of generation turns, their children begin to complicate the lives of these two men. Samad has twin boys, Magid and Millat, and Archie has a daughter, Irie. Naturally enough, the children become friends and they create a dazzlingly complex world of cross-cultural fusion in modern-day London.

Samad is concerned at the way in which his sons are growing up in Britain (Magid has taken to being addressed as 'Mark Smith'), so he dispatches Magid back 'home' to be brought up by relatives. After Magid's departure, Millat Iqbal and Irie Jones befriend a boy called Joshua and a third family, the Chalfens, take centre stage. Marcus Chalfen, an eccentric scientist and university lecturer, and his wife Joyce, a mother and author of The Inner Life of Houseplants, have four children, including their eldest, Joshua.

The Chalfens are a liberal, pseudo-Marxist, white middle-class family who, as one might expect, welcome this 'exciting' rush of hybridity into their lives. Eventually, Marcus becomes penpals with the orientally exiled Magid, and on Magid's return to Britain it is Marcus who meets him at Heathrow and begins to make plans for this now level-headed, polite young man to study law. Meanwhile, Millat has renounced 'white birds' and joined 'the Cricklewood branch of the Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation', which Irie points out have an 'acronym problem' - Kevin.

Samad and Archie 'observe' events from the vantage point of their retreat, O'Connell's Café on the Finchley Road, a place run by Abdul-Mickey, the son of an immigrant named Ali. All five sons were named Abdul, but Ali took the precaution of attaching an English name as a gesture to the clarity demanded by the new country. O'Connell's offers Samad and Archie a place from which they can view the interaction between the various families as the novel ranges back and forth in both contemporary and historical time. This multi-layered, deeply-plotted novel resists easy categorisation, which is precisely the author's point.

Britain has perennially sought to define herself and her character by defining others. Naturally enough, the country finds herself in great difficulty when presented with those who seem keen to resist definition. These 'in-betweens', these Abdul-Mickeys (or his brother Abdul-Colin), these working-class white men, like Archie, who marry Jamaican women 20 years their junior, these non-believing 'Muslims' such as Millat, these 'white birds' who go weak at the knees for people such as Magid - such people present Britain with a problem of categorisation.

For those of a colonial mindset, this swirling postcolonial world is blurring distinctions and challenging received wisdoms at an alarming rate. It is uncomfortably clear to those of the 'old school' that the hitherto familiar cultural signifiers of belonging are no longer the preserve of one group to the exclusion of another. One only needs to overhear a conversation on practically any London street corner:

'For your information,' snapped Irie, moving the nut out of Millat's reach, 'old people like coconuts. They can use the milk for their tea.'

Irie pressed on in the face of Millat's retching. 'And I got some crusty French bread and some cheese-singlets and some apples - '

'We got apples, you chief,' cut in Millat, 'chief', for some inexplicable reason hidden in the etymology of north London slang, meaning fool, arse, wanker, a loser of the most colossal proportions.

'Well, I got some more and better apples, akchully, and some Kendal mint cake and some ackee and saltfish.'

'I hate ackee and saltfish.'

However, it is not only those of a colonial mindset who must open themselves to change. When 'nature' visits Britain in October 1987, in the form of a hurricane, the Iqbals' world is shaken up. While Samad and Millat hurry to flee the house, Alansa sits stubbornly on the sofa confident that nothing will happen because 'Mr Fish', the BBC weatherman, has assured 'her' that all will be fine. When she relents, and gets in the car and drives from the house with 110mph winds howling, she confesses that her world has changed.

She is of an immigrant generation that expected to encounter a benign Britain; a 'civilised' Britain, as characterised by BBC announcers in dinner-jackets, crumpets for tea and the comforting thwack of leather on willow. Quite probably a Britain that never existed, but nonetheless - in her mind - a more reliable Britain than that to which she is currently being exposed:

'England, this is meant to be! I moved to England so I wouldn't have to do this. Never again will I trust that Mr Crab.'

'Amma, it's Mr Fish.'

'From now on, he's Mr Crab to me,' snapped Alansa with a dark look. 'BBC or no BBC.'

The depiction of the dysfunctional Chalfen family, while often funny, finally seems too cartoon-like. Marcus and Joyce Chalfen tolerate the foul-mouthed Millat, who rolls joints at their table, drinks their alcohol and generally calls the shots around their house.

'Oh, Millat, don't smoke that stuff. Every time we see you these days you're smoking. It upsets Oscar so much. He's not that young and he understands more than you think. He understands about marijuana.'

'What's mary wana?' asked Oscar.

'You know what it is, Oscar. It's what makes Millat all horrible, like we were talking about today, and it's what kills the little brain cells he has.'

'Get off my fucking back, Joyce.'

It is frustrating not to have a more 'substantial' white family at the heart of the novel, for Irie, Millat and Magid are treated by the Chalfens with a degree of patronage that is unsurprising. Their son, Joshua, has a more complicated response to the situation, for Irie is the object of his desire. However, his two-dimensional parents do little more than enliven the more farcical elements of the narrative.

There is nothing farcical about the pain of wanting to belong. In this respect, White Teeth is full of false smiles and contrived faces, masks that are repeatedly donned in order to better hide the pain. The 'mongrel' nation that is Britain is still struggling to find a way to stare into the mirror and accept the ebb and flow of history that has produced this fortuitously diverse condition and its concomitant pain.

Zadie Smith's first novel is an audaciously assured contribution to this process of staring into the mirror. Her narrator is deeply self-conscious, so much so that one can almost hear the crisp echo of Salman Rushdie's footsteps. However, her wit, her breadth of vision and her ambition are of her own making. The plot is rich, at times dizzyingly so, but White Teeth squares up to the two questions which gnaw at the very roots of our modern condition: Who are we? Why are we here?